The present-day pop culture, media landscape, and public discourse, in general, are dominated by the massive and ever-growing influence of social media. With things as they are, it shouldn’t come off as too big of a surprise that social media influencers have an equally gigantic sway on public opinions and the pace of developing trends.
Therefore, using this massive social leverage as a very powerful marketing tool is quickly becoming an absolute necessity rather than a lucrative option.
But how to use influencer marketing in the most interesting way and make it work with the broader brand awareness campaigns? Let us try to find out together.
Set up clear goals and KPIs
Let’s get this thing straight first – getting an endorsement from online celebrities is very beneficial but if you don’t have a clear idea about what you want to accomplish with this type of promotion, to whom you are appealing, when do you want to see the results and in what quantity, you will be able to get only limited results.
So, before setting out on any sort of venture of this type, assess how beneficial it can be for you, and what you want to achieve, and set up the KPIs to measure how successful you are.
Choose the influencers appropriate for your niche
If you fail to do that, the marketing messages you are going to roll out will feel very dishonest and fall on deaf ears. Make sure to find the influencers that are speaking to your intended client base and can echo your brand awareness strategies in an organic and natural manner. Fortunately, the level of someone’s influence can be easily expressed with three Rs of influencer marketing:
- Reach – The measure of someone’s audience size
- Relevance – This indicator illustrates how someone’s topics are relevant to your business
- Resonance – This is the level of activity an influencer produces by publishing content
Look for the localized social imprint
Essentially, the social media influencers that are going to contribute to your brand awareness efforts don’t have to pack global fame to get you the results you want. But they need to have a sway in the area you are going to tackle and in the social circles you are going to address.
Therefore, if you are, for instance, expanding to Australia, a professional influencer marketing agency in Melbourne will produce more tangible results than the pursuit of celebrities with a more global but also shallow and spread-out appeal.
Include influencers in the product/service development process
This way, your branding goals will become much more aligned with the influencer’s content goals so you will create a much higher level of marketing cohesion. Also, by having a stake in your company, influencers will take its success much closer to their heart and work more devotedly toward this end.
Finally, companies often tend to maintain a sort of corporate, data-based bird view when developing products and services. Third-party participation can definitely make these activities more productive and fresh.
Develop social media influencers in-house
Even though the first thing that crosses our minds when thinking about influencer marketing is hiring already-established online celebrities to promote your brand, helping your employees to achieve the same level of exposure presents an equally viable option.
As a matter of fact, despite requiring more time to take effect, this approach gives brands much greater control over the entire process and appeals directly to the intended follower base so it definitely presents a very promising long-term opportunity.
Leverage the power of micro-influencers
By this we mean going even smaller than the local and industry celebrities we mentioned in earlier sections. Namely, according to recent research as many as 82% of consumers put very high trust in the recommendations from friends or other persons they recognize as sincere advisors.
These people can be very easily incentivized to serve as your brand ambassadors and promote your company on social media with various calls to action, referral programs, customer loyalty programs, and similar methods.
Tie your branding efforts to some relevant social cause
This is the simplest way to easily expand the appeal of your brand way past the narrow industry borders and engage in much wider conversations where you can get a lot of organic rubs from influential online personas.
Unfortunately, the list of social issues you can try to address is growing with each passing day so you won’t have a problem finding a cause to fight for. But, while doing that try to be very genuine and take the topics you are going to tackle close to the heart or your efforts may horribly backfire.
Final comments
We hope these couple of examples gave you a better idea about how influencer marketing can be successfully used to push your brand awareness campaigns forward and truly put your business on the map.
Of course, this is only the tip of the iceberg and the options you have on the table are truly endless. But, these selected picks should push you in the right direction, and from that point on every step you make will be a step forward.
By Mike Johnston
